American Graffiti

My lovely literate wife Lucine—“Armenian for Darlene,” I type out of habit, and wince at the thought of the shoe flying across the room—recently reviewed for the local library one of those pop-anthropological books in which a big-city reporter spends a few weeks in a small town and lives to tell the tale.

I’ll withhold the book’s title, since Lucine said the author meant well, and besides, when a really egregious target waddles into my sights I’ve become like my dad hunting deer—I shoot wide and low and let it lollop away. When I was a mere stripling I’d blast the bastard, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

The latest Margaret Mead in Podunk committed this sentence: “It’s easy to spot someone who grew up in a small town and got out: they have a breathless air about them, their expressions somehow startled and dreamy.”

Talk about the shock of unrecognition: What the hell does that mean? My wife teased a few laughs from its sheer obtuseness. And if anyone can spot the startled dreaminess of exiles from Elm Street it ought to be Lucine, a Southern Cal gal turned rural Yorker who stubbornly resists my kindly efforts to compress her into the John Mellencamp line: “Married an LA doll and brought her to this small town / Now she’s small town, just like me.”

Actually, as town supervisor and emcee of the Onion Queen Pageant, she makes me look like a regular boulevardier, but I suppose as a native I can be identified by some hidden Lovecraftian nodule.

Where this latest tourist among the rustics goes wrong is in not crediting the stay-at-homes with the capacity to dream and in not noticing that some of those who “got out” dream of returning—a return barred, so often, by the poisonous assumption that success in America can be measured in the distance one has traveled from home.

My friend Patrick Deneen, who teaches political theory at Georgetown, has written on the decentralist website Front Porch Republic of interviewing at a college (much less prestigious than Georgetown) near his hometown in Connecticut:

I was inordinately excited at this possibility, thinking that it might work out that my wife and I and newborn son might be able to settle close to family and childhood friends. When asked about accommodations, I proudly informed the college that I would be staying in my bedroom that night—my childhood bedroom, that is. During the two day interview I related in every conversation that I was native to the area and had a longstanding relationship to the campus, having attended its plays, movies, and used its library for many years. I believed my local connection would make me an especially attractive candidate, sure in the knowledge that a school would be attracted to someone who already had deep roots in the community and was likely to build a long life and career in that place.

In fact, Patrick writes, “this proud display of my nativeness went over badly.” The American professional class does not just accept rootlessness as the cost of achievement—it positively fetishizes it. And so it is befuddled—startled, even—when confronted by a Deneen.

Levon Helm of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, drummer for The Band and a great American, described a cotton-farming guitar player from Elaine, Arkansas, named Thurlow Brown: “He could have been famous, but he didn’t like leaving his farm, so he never broke out of our area.”

My hero!

Thurlow Brown of Elaine is worth every deracinated novelist who ever took a table at Elaine’s. But how do we convince young Thurlow Browns to ignore the synthesized drumbeat that tells our children that to stay at home is the act of a loser, and that if you’re not in NY, LA, or DC you’re nowhere?

When another Front Porcher, the reprobate wit Jason Peters, cracked open the treasury of Augustana College a while back to have me out to hector his students, we did a little post-lecture proselytizing in the Quad Cities.

Midnight settled on Davenport, Iowa, home of the late 19th-century local color novelist Octave Thanet. Fearing that her tones had been forgotten by the town she never forsook, and wondering just how I might interest the rantipole youths and roistering blades of Davenport in their native daughter, I took to decorating the men’s rooms of that fair city with obscene graffiti about Octave’s amative practices.

Forgive me, Octave, baby. I didn’t know what else to do. Lacking the “breathless air” of those who “got out,” you and Thurlow and I dream on.

Bill Kauffman’s column “Home Plate” appears every month in The American Conservative. If you enjoyed this article, please support the magazine by making a tax-deductible donation.

But it’s an old truth, about a prophet never being received well in his hometown. The basic notion is that you have a bit of mystique and mystery about you, a kind of power, when no one can sum up your past.

And the notion, too, that you only have value if the economy has sought you out and away from your birthplace.

The real killer for the idolization of the big cities is a simple demographic fact: aside from a few of the very rich old families, virtually no-one in a city like New York has been there for very long. The natives, aside from some ghettos of urban villagers (not all of them poor) have all been pushed out by people from somewhere else–including all those exotic third-world culture-bearers, most of whom were regarded as ignorant yokels in their home country.

Not that generations of continuity has ever been the norm for the entire population of magnet cities. But, at least in New York City, over the last generation the turnover has reached the point where there’s no connection any more with the basis for a city’s reputation (unless all you’re interested in is entertainment).

If you want to embarrass a white English-speaker who lives in New York City, all you have to do is ask them where they’re from. Try it. It really works. No one expects it coming, precisely because they assume that everyone has the same dirty little secret as they do, and can be counted on not to bring the subject up.

I learned this by just continuing to ask the question in all innocence, as I had since the time when the answer might have been “Gun Hill Road”, or “the Upper West Side”, or “South Brooklyn”. If the answer was “Turkey Scratch, Arkansas”, well, back then, he (or better yet, she) was probably in New York for some reason that he wasn’t ashamed to talk about–usually because he did something interesting and/or lucrative. (And hey, I’d be genuinely interested to have some impressions of Turkey Scratch. I bet you can do some neat things there that I can’t do in my neighborhood–like walk around at night without exercising survival skills, or dip your toes in the canal without getting chemical burns.) Today, they know that “taking acting lessons and working as a waiter” doesn’t really cut it. Neither does “working in the media”, because they assume you know what one has to do to keep a job in the media.

An important corrolary of this is that the politics of these “urban sophisticates” are the politics of people who have no idea of what’s actually going on around them, let alone how a big city and its society really runs. They’re certainly not going to find out from reading the Times. Via the media, they’re manipulated like puppets by the old-fashioned (but not always old) ghetto political machines, and by the powers that sway the media directly with money.

I speak as a (2nd generation) New York City native who got sick of living in a town populated by the sort of people who leave home to join the circus. I fled to the Upper Midwest, where the grownups saw they had a pretty good thing, and stayed home.